Monthly Archives: July 2017

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk responds to a question by Nevada Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval during the third day of the National Governors Association's meeting on Saturday in Providence, R.I. Among other things, Musk warned governors that artificial intelligence poses a "fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization." Stephan Savoia/AP hide caption

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk responds to a question by Nevada Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval during the third day of the National Governors Association's meeting on Saturday in Providence, R.I. Among other things, Musk warned governors that artificial intelligence poses a "fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization."

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, speaking to U.S. governors this weekend, told the political leaders that artificial intelligence poses an "existential threat" to human civilization.

At the bipartisan National Governors Association in Rhode Island, Musk also spoke about energy sources, his own electric car company and space travel. But when Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada, grinning, asked if robots will take everyone's jobs in the future Musk wasn't joking when he responded.

Yes, "robots will do everything better than us," Musk said. But he's worried about more than the job market.

"AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization, and I don't think people fully appreciate that," Musk said. He said he has access to cutting-edge AI technology, and that based on what he's seen, AI is "the scariest problem."

Musk told the governors that AI calls for precautionary, proactive government intervention: "I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it's too late," he said.

He was clearly not thrilled to make that argument, calling regulation generally "not fun" and "irksome," but he said that in the case of AI, the risks are too high to allow AI to develop unfettered.

"I think people should be really concerned about it," Musk said. "I keep sounding the alarm bell."

It's true: For years, Musk has issued Cassandra-like cautions about the risks of artificial intelligence. In 2014, he likened AI developers to people summoning demons they think they can control. In 2015, he signed a letter warning of the risk of an AI arms race.

Musk has invested in a project designed to make AI tech open-source, which he asserts will prevent it from being controlled by one company. And earlier this year, Maureen Dowd wrote a lengthy piece for Vanity Fair about Musk's "crusade to stop the A.I. apocalypse." Dowd noted that some Silicon Valley leaders including Google co-founder Larry Page do not share Musk's skepticism, and describe AI as a possible force for good.

Critics "argue that Musk is interested less in saving the world than in buffing his brand," Dowd writes, and that his speeches on the threat of AI are part of a larger sales strategy.

Back at the governors conference, some politicians expressed skepticism about the wisdom of regulating a technology that's still in development. Musk said the first step would be for the government to gain "insight" into the actual status of current research.

"Once there is awareness, people will be extremely afraid," Musk said. "As they should be."

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Elon Musk Warns Governors: Artificial Intelligence Poses 'Existential Risk' - NPR

Artificial intelligence is infiltrating our daily lives, with applications that curate your phone pics, manage your email, and translate text from any language into another. Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft are all heavily researching how to integrate AI into their major services. Soon youll likely interact with an AI (or its output) every time you pick up your phone. Should you trust it? Not always.

AI can analyze data more quickly and accurately than humans, but it can also inherit our biases. To learn, it needs massive quantities of data, and the easiest way to find that data is to feed it text from the internet. But the internet contains some extremely biased language. A Stanford study found that an internet-trained AI associated stereotypically white names with positive words like love, and black names with negative words like failure and cancer.

Luminoso Chief Science Officer Rob Speer oversees the open-source data set ConceptNet Numberbatch, which is used as a knowledge base for AI systems. He tested one of Numberbatchs data sources and found obvious problems with their word associations. When fed the analogy question Man is to woman as shopkeeper is to... the system filled in housewife. It similarly associated women with sewing and cosmetics.

While these associations might be appropriate for certain applications, they would cause problems in common AI tasks like evaluating job applicants. An AI doesnt know which associations are problematic, so it would have no problem ranking a womans rsum lower than an identical rsum from a man. Similarly, when Speer tried building a restaurant review algorithm, it rated Mexican food lower because it had learned to associate Mexican with negative words like illegal.

So Speer went in and de-biased ConceptNet. He identified inappropriate associations and adjusted them to zero, while maintaining appropriate associations like man/uncle and woman/aunt. He did the same with words related to race, ethnicity, and religion. To fight human bias, it took a human.

Numberbatch is the only semantic database with built-in de-biasing, Speer says in an email. Hes happy for this competitive advantage, but he hopes other knowledge bases will follow suit:

This is the threat of AI in the near term. Its not some sci-fi scenario where robots take over the world. Its AI-powered services making decisions we dont understand, where the decisions turn out to hurt certain groups of people.

The scariest thing about this bias is how invisibly it can take over. According to Speer, some people [will] go through life not knowing why they get fewer opportunities, fewer job offers, more interactions with the police or the TSA... Of course, he points out, racism and sexism are baked into society, and promising technological advances, even when explicitly meant to counteract them, often amplify them. Theres no such thing as an objective tool built on subjective data. So AI developers bear a huge responsibility to find the flaws in their AI and address them.

There should be more understanding of whats real and whats hype, Speer says. Its easy to overhype AI because most people dont have the right metaphors to understand it yet, and that stops people from being appropriately skeptical.

Theres no AI that works like the human brain, he says. To counter the hype, I hope we can stop talking about brains and start talking about whats actually going on: its mostly statistics, databases, and pattern recognition. Which shouldnt make it any less interesting.

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What Makes an Artificial Intelligence Racist and Sexist - Lifehacker

Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Robotic Hogwash! Artificial Intelligence Will Not Take Over Wall Street Wall Street Journal (subscription) A decade on, artificial intelligence and machine learning are the buzzwords in automated investment. But for all the hype, applying AI to investment still has ... and more »

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Robotic Hogwash! Artificial Intelligence Will Not Take Over Wall Street - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to revolutionise our lives, drive our cars, diagnose our health problems, and lead us into a new future where thinking machines do things that were yet to imagine.

Or does it? Not everyone agrees.

Even billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who admits he has access to some of the most cutting-edge AI, said recently that without some regulation AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.

So what is the future of AI? Michael Milford and Peter Stratton are both heavily involved in AI research and they have different views on how it will impact on our lives in the future.

Michael:

Answering this question depends on what you consider to be artificial intelligence.

Basic machine learning algorithms underpin many technologies that we interact with in our everyday lives - voice recognition, face recognition - but are application-specific and can only do one very specific defined task (and not always well).

More capable AI - what we might consider as being somewhat smart - is only now becoming widespread in areas such as online retail and marketing, smartphones, assistive car systems and service robots such as robotic vacuum cleaners.

Peter:

The most obvious and useful examples of current AI are the speech recognition on your phone, and search engines such as Google. There is also IBMs Watson, which in 2011 beat human champion players at the US TV game show Jeopardy, and is now being trialled in business and healthcare.

Most recently, Googles DeepMind AI called AlphaGo beat the world champion Go player, surprising a lot of people especially since Go is an extremely complex game, way surpassing chess.

Peter:

Many auto manufacturers and research institutions are competing to create practical driverless cars for general road use. While currently these cars can drive themselves for much of the time, many challenges remain in dealing with bad weather (heavy rain, fog and snow) and random real-world events such as roadworks, accidents and other blockages.

These incidents often require some degree of human judgement, common sense and even calculated risk to successfully navigate through. We are still a long way from fully autonomous vehicles that dont need a licensed driver ready to take control in an instant.

The same can be said for all the AI that we will see over the coming 10-20 years, such as online virtual personal assistants, accountants, legal and financial advisers, doctors and even physical shop-bots, museum guides, cleaners and security guards.

They will be advanced tools that are very useful in specific situations, but they will never fully replace people because they will have little common sense (probably none, in fact).

Michael:

We will definitely see a range of steady, incremental improvements in everyday AI. Online product recommendations will get better, your phone or car will understand your voice increasingly well and your vacuum cleaner robot wont get stuck as often.

Its likely that well see some major advances beyond todays technology in some but not all of the following areas: self-driving cars, healthcare, utilities (electricity, water, and so on) management, legal, and service areas such as cleaning robots.

I disagree on self-driving cars - theres no real reason why there wont be fully autonomous controlled ride-sharing fleets in the affluent centres of cities, and this is indeed the strategy of companies such as NuTonomy, working in Singapore and Boston.

Michael:

Major advances will come from two sources.

First, there is a long runway of steady incremental improvements left in many areas of conventional AI - large, complex neural networks and algorithms. These systems will continue to improve steadily as more training data becomes available and as scientists perfect them.

The second area will likely be biological inspiration. Scientists are only just starting to tap into the knowledge about how brain networks work, and its likely they will copy or adapt what we know about animal and human brains to make current deep learning networks far more capable.

Peter:

Old-fashioned AI, which was based on pure logic and computer programs that tried to get machines to behave intelligently, basically failed to do anything that humans are good at and computers are not (speech and image recognition, playing complex strategic games, for example).

Whats quite clear now is that our best-performing AI is based on how we think the brain works.

But our current brain-based AI (called Deep Artificial Neural Networks) is still light years away from emulating an actual brain. Enhanced AI capabilities in the future will come from developing better theories of how the brain works.

The fundamental science needed to cultivate these theories will probably come from publicly funded research institutions, which will then be spun off into commercial start-up companies, and then quickly acquired by interested large corporations if they look like they might be successful.

Peter:

Most jobs wont be under threat for a long time, probably several generations. Real people are needed to actually make any significant decisions because AI currently has no common sense.

Instead of replacing jobs, our overall quality of life will go up. For example, right now few people can afford a personal assistant, or a full-time life coach. In the near future, well all have (a virtual) one!

Our virtual doctor will be working for us daily, monitoring our health and making exercise and lifestyle suggestions.

Our houses and workplaces might be cleaner, but we will still need people to clean the spots the robots miss. Well also need people to deploy, retrieve and maintain all the robots.

Our goods will be cheaper due to reduced transport costs, but well still need human drivers to cover all the situations the self-drivers cant.

All this doesnt even mention the whole new entertainment technologies and industries that will spring up to capture our increased disposable income and to cash-in on our improved quality of life.

So yes, jobs will change, but there will still be plenty of them.

Michael:

Its likely that a significant fraction of jobs will be under threat over the coming decade. Its important to note that this wont necessarily be divided by blue-collar versus white-collar, but rather by which occupations are easily automatable.

Its unlikely that an effective plumber robot will be built in the near future, but aspects of the so far undisrupted construction industry may change radically.

Some people say machines will never have the emotional capabilities of humans. Whether that is true or not, many jobs will be under threat with even the most rudimentary levels of emotional understanding and interaction.

Dont think about the complex, nuanced interaction you had with your psychologist; instead think about the one with that disinterested, uncaring part-time hospitality worker. The bar for disruption is not as high as many think.

That leaves the question of what happens then. There are two scenarios - the first being that, like in the past, new types of jobs are generated by the technological revolution.

The other is that humanity gradually transitions into a Utopian society where scientific, artistic and sporting pursuits are pursued at leisure. The short to medium-term reality is probably somewhere in between.

Michael:

Its unlikely in the near future but possible. The real danger is the unpredictability. Skynet-like killer cyborgs as featured in the Terminator film series are unlikely because that development cycle takes a while, and we have multiple opportunities to stop development.

But AI could destroy or damage humanity in other unpredictable ways. For example, when big companies like Google Deepmind start entering into healthcare, its likely that they will improve patient outcomes through a combination of big data and intelligent systems.

One of the temptations or pressures will be to deploy these extremely complex systems before we completely understand every possible ramification. Imagine the pressure if there is good evidence it will save thousands of lives per year.

As we well know, we have a long history of negative unintended consequences with new technology that we didnt fully understand.

In a far-fetched but not impossible healthcare scenario, deploying AI may lead to catastrophic outcomes - a world-wide AI network deciding in ways invisible to us human observers to kill us all off to optimise some misguided performance goal.

The challenge is that with newly developing technologies, there is an illusion of 100% control, which doesnt really exist.

Peter:

All our current AI, and any that we can possibly create in the foreseeable future, are just tools developed for specific jobs and totally useless outside of the exact duties they were designed for. They dont have thoughts or feelings. These AIs are just as likely to try to take over the world as your Xbox or your toaster.

One day, I believe, we will build machines that rival us in intelligence, and these machines will have their own thoughts and possibly learn in an unconstrained way. This sounds scary. But humans are dangerous for exactly the reasons that the machines wont be.

Humans evolved in a constant struggle for life and death, which made us innately competitive and potentially treacherous. When we build the machines, we can instead build them with any underlying motivation that we would like.

For example, we could build an intelligent machine whose only desire is to dismantle itself. Or, we could build in a hidden remote-controlled off switch that is completely separate from any of the machines own circuits, and an auto-shutdown reflex if the machine somehow ever notices it.

All these safeguards will be trivial to implement. So there is simply no way that we could accidentally build a machine that then tries to wipe out the human race.

Of course, because humans themselves are dangerous, someone could build a machine that doesnt have these safeguards and use it for nefarious purposes. But we have that same problem now with nuclear weapons.

In the future, just as now, we have to hope that we are simply smart enough to use our technology wisely.

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The future of artificial intelligence: two experts disagree - The Conversation AU